Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Can Spices, Herbs, and Essential Oils Improve Your Health?

Episode Date: March 23, 2018

You’ve probably heard that herbs, spices, and essential oils can do many wonderful things for your body, like balance your hormones, reduce inflammation, improve your gut health, speed up fat loss, and more. How true are these claims, though? Can you really help “optimize your body” by sprinkling some goodies on your meals and huffing nice-smelling oils? Can the pigment in curry really improve your joint health? Does adding cinnamon to your oatmeal really help control your blood sugar? Is garlic the super antioxidant, immune-boosting, cancer-fighting wunder-spice that many people say it is? Well, this is what we’re going to explore in today’s episode with Kurtis Frank, who is the co-founder and was the lead researcher of Examine.com, as well as the Director of Research for my supplement company, Legion Athletics. Kurtis has researched spices, herbs, and essential oils extensively and has a lot of insight to share. As you’ll see, a lot of the marketing hype used to sell us on these things is unwarranted, but there definitely are a handful of winners that deserve some attention. So...if you’ve wondered if spices like turmeric, cinnamon, garlic, cocoa, and rosemary, and essential oils like lemon, rose, and lavender can actually improve your health and well-being, then this episode is for you. 6:47 - What are spices & herbs? 9:00 - What are the health benefits of Cinnamon? 10:12 - How much cinnamon do you need to consume to cause an effect? 11:14 - What are the health benefits of peppermint and saffron? 14:09 - What are the health benefits of turmeric and curcumin? 16:14 - What are the health benefits of garlic? 19:46 - What are the health benefits of rosemary? 22:59 - What are the health benefits of ginger? 25:46 - Do spices promote fat burning and boost metabolism? 29:34 - What are the health benefits of cocoa? 31:14 - Do essential oils have health benefits? 38:41 - What are the health benefits of rose, lavender, and lemon scented essential oils? Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

Thank you. Guten Tag, meine Freunde. Mike here back with another episode of the podcast. And this time we're talking spices, herbs, and essential oils. Now you've probably heard that these things can do many wonderful things for your body, like balance your hormones, reduce inflammation, improve your gut health, speed up fat loss, and much more. How true are these things though? Can you really help optimize your body? That's like a trendy thing right now. Total body, total human optimization by sprinkling little goodies on your meals and huffing nice smelling oils. Can the pigment in curry really

improve your joint health? For example, does adding cinnamon to your oatmeal really help control your blood sugar levels or reduce your risk of developing diabetes? Is garlic the super duper antioxidant, immune boosting, cancer fighting, wunder spice that many people say it is? Well, in this episode, we are going to explore all of that and more with Curtis Frank, who is the co-founder and who was the lead researcher and writer over at examine.com and is now the director of research for my supplement company, Legion Athletics. And Curtis has spent a lot of time over the years researching spices, herbs, and essential oils, just because it's been something he's personally interested in. And he has a lot of insight to share. As you will see,

a lot of the marketing hype around these things is unwarranted. They're not going to change your life, no matter how many of them you include in your daily regimen and no matter at what dosage you include them in. But there definitely are a handful of winners that do deserve some attention. And Curtis thinks that we'll actually get more and more attention going forward as more research is done. So if you've ever wondered if spices like turmeric, cinnamon, garlic, cocoa, and rosemary, and if you ever wondered if essential oils like lemon rose and lavender can actually do something, if they can actually improve your

health and wellbeing in some way, then this episode is for you. This is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills, but I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead, I'm just going to quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my 100% natural joint supplement Fortify. Now, Fortify helps keep your joints healthy, functional, and pain-free by reducing joint inflammation and preventing cartilage loss. And its ingredients are scientifically proven to alleviate joint pain, inflammation, and swelling, and to help keep your cartilage healthy, strong, and intact. All of this is why Fortify has over 200 reviews on Amazon with a 4.5 star average, which I might add is fairly impressive for a joint supplement,

and another 90 plus reviews on my website, also with a 4.5 star average. So if you want healthy, functional, and pain-free joints that can withstand the demands of your active lifestyle, then you want to head over to www.legionathletics.com and pick up a bottle of Fortify today. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code podcast at checkout and you will save 10% on your entire order. And lastly, you should also know that I have a very simple 100% money back guarantee that works like this. You either love my stuff or you get your money back, period. You don't have to return the products. You don't have to fill out forms. You don't have to jump through any other hoops or go through any other

shenanigans so you really can't lose here head over to www.legionathletics.com now place your order and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet and if for whatever reason they're just not for you Contact us and we will give you a full refund on the spot. All righty. That is enough shameless plugging for now, at least. Let's get to the show. Mr. Curtis Frank, welcome back to my illustrious podcast. How's it going, man? Pretty good. You should feel very, very privileged to be on the show. Oh, most definitely.

All right. So what are we talking about today? We're talking about spices and herbs and essential oils. A bit random. I know people listening to me, I'm like, huh, how does that all come together? And yeah, it is kind of random. It kind of just came together and talking with Curtis where we could do, I was thinking, of course, we can always tap Curtis's immense brain for supplementation knowledge, but he also knows a lot of things about other things like this stuff. And I thought that'd be a fun discussion as well. And also because it is kind of trendy, essential oils are probably, I don't know. I think it's kind of both of them. All that stuff is pretty trendy right now. The spices that can insert random health benefit here, herbs that can insert random health benefit here or essential oils because it sounds easy, right it's just like oh sure i can put some

rosemary in my uh whatever like i put some rosemary in my big mac that that makes it good right yeah like marketing wise it's just you need a new label every now and then and since like curcumin from turmeric is so popular and all that as a supplement i should say because it's also technically a spice a lot of people just went oh but cinnamon is also a spice and hot pepper is also a spice. So they just try to like put a lot of things under the umbrella term spice and then sell it as the health benefits of spices, as if there's something unique and interesting about spices themselves. But it's pretty much just you throw a few darts, then you see what what shape it makes and then you just try to make something of that shape and essential oils are kind of the same thing but i honestly don't know how essential oils got so big it's confusing like i know quite a bit

about them and some of it's interesting but there is no reason why essential oils should be like alongside homeopathy in terms of popularity. I mean, let's start with the spices, herbs first and then get to the oils. So I think we should probably start with just some general kind of information to just educate people on what these things are and then get to some specifics that, you know, stuff they've probably heard. Like what cinnamon can do for you or sage can do with you or random spicy thing like chili pepper can do for you or sage can do with you or a random spicy thing like chili pepper can do for you. Also curcumin, turmeric is another good example. Yeah. So just to begin with a few definitions and laying some groundwork, there isn't anything technical or botanical unique about the word spice. You can grow turmeric in

the ground. You pluck it up and and it's a root, and you just grind that root into a powder. The moment you put it on your food, like the verb spice becomes this new designation because you're spicing your food with it. If you put it into a pill and you can't taste it, it's not really a spice, it's just the root of a plant in a pill so for a lot of these herbs it's just stuff that has at times been in our diet just from food not from supplements and then people just try to connect it because i guess it's a nice blend between dietary supplementations and just your overall diet health and well-being it seems more marketable in that sense. But a lot of times when we approach this topic, we will have to think about the compound in question, both when you

put it on food and when you put it in a capsule. Because capsules are processed, they're concentrated and you don't need to taste it. But if you put on food, you're going to have to taste it. So for some things, like you want to take a high dose of let's say curcumin you cannot eat that much turmeric unless you have like a stomach of steel pretty much and other things like cinnamon unless you want to have the like cinnamon dragon challenge and almost choke to death then you're gonna have to go for a supplement but a lot of times there will be that division like or or berberine if you like the taste of vomit, then maybe you'll like berberine. Oh, yeah. Especially that.

But it's just the whole, the herb is good as a supplement does not mean that it is good as a spice in food. When we talk about supplements of cinnamon, it does not mean that putting a cinnamon stick in your tea confers the same benefits. So let's talk about cinnamon. Let's just start there because again, that's one of the, if you go Googling around for listicles of herbs and spices, cinnamon's going to probably be on all of them. And they're going to say, oh, it will help lower your blood sugar levels and you'll have a powerful anti-diabetic effect, stuff like that. Yeah. So I have no uh problems with cinnamon to be honest like the compound in it i believe it is a going off memory i think it's 4-hydroxy isoleucine because like

isoleucine one of the three branched amino acids by itself does help deposit glucose into cells and the cinnamon component that is similar to it also does this. So if you were to take a cinnamon supplement alongside anything that increases blood sugar, you can help put that blood sugar into target tissue. I do not know if it specifically prefers muscle over fat. Maybe in a contextual setting, like if you take it after a workout, just because that's when your muscles are trying to eat everything anyways. But extending it to a long-term anti-diabetic effect, you could definitely argue that it has an anti-diabetic

effect, but it would be weak magnitude-wise. And how much cinnamon are we talking about here, too, to have any effect? Is it an amount that is actually feasible that you'd want to eat, or like you said, is it just way too much? Is it something you'd want to eat or is like you said is it just way too much you'd see something you'd have to supplement with from what i recall the doses that you could actually eat for food or like if you put a cinnamon stick in your tea very minor effects i'm not going to say that a cinnamon stick in tea is useless it could be beneficial but most studies that show like effects big enough for us to actually care about use the dietary supplements.

So the idea that if you put cinnamon in your apple pie, it can be like a slightly less diabetic. That's a pipe dream. It's just, no, it's not going to work. And I guess that's kind of the, so you can feel better about my apple pie,

I guess. Right. Yes. I've heard some people just like to have that whole thing is like, Oh, if I put it in the spice, then it's not as much junk food, is it? It's like you went from 100% junk food to 99% junk food when he had the option of zero. So yeah, missing the force for the trees here.

Makes sense. What are some other spices and herbs that you think are worth mentioning because they are in the case of cinnamon, we're like, yeah, sure. It's fine. But it's not what many people say it's going to be realistically speaking, practically speaking. So it could be, it could be a couple of examples of those, um, or examples of some spices and herbs that you think are actually pretty neat because you can actually eat them in amounts that can, can make a difference, even if it's a slight difference in some slight way. If we go on the ones that are only relevant when we're talking about food intake, the two that I find most interesting to talk about first are saffron and peppermint. Note that peppermint is mostly the oil, but if you just have like peppermint leaves or whatever, they have oil in them.

Because peppermint is really good at relaxing muscles. And when you eat it, it's going to be the esophagus, it's going to be the stomach and all that. If you have gas like GERD, esophageal reflux disease, peppermint is going to be your worst enemy, because it actually will relax the sphincter separating the stomach and the esophagus it could also be useful for irritable bowel syndrome but the studies on it tend to use the actual supplemental form rather than the food diffuse esophageal spasms i haven't actually met somebody with that problem and what is that problem you know what's the summary it's basically when your esophagus has spasms. Okay. But basically, peppermint is actually very good for alleviating that, just because it's a muscle relaxant.

And even if it's not well absorbed from the intestines, it has to pass your esophagus to the stomach, and then actually go in your intestines, and it affects those muscles too. Right. So for any sort of cramping associated with the small intestine, stomach, and esophagus, there is an argument that peppermint, more so the oil, but also just as put in food, could be helpful. And the best part is that you don't need to worry about the classically really bad absorption rates of some of these herbs because you don't actually need to absorb it if the throat and

stomach are your targets right uh beyond that uh saffron as i mentioned earlier it's interesting because the dose is obscenely low like you go to a grocery store you buy saffron and you don't get much of the spice and even that would be like five servings of a supplemental dose. And it seems to have some studies suggesting that it could affect depressive symptoms. It interacts with serotonin signaling, but it also has potential toxicity. And while the studies are not really, we don't really know the magnitude of antidepressant effects or what is causing the toxicity. So it's not something i can recommend at this point in time but the dose of saffron that does have these effects is the dose that you can get when spicing food interesting what about turmeric curcumin obviously super popular uh yeah so for that uh out of all the effects of curcumin because curcumin has very bad absorption rates and oh

sorry first let's just everybody listening turmeric is the spice that gives curry its color just in case anybody doesn't know listening and curcumin is the main component of turmeric right there's a lot of benefits out there related to curcumin but curcumin by itself has really bad absorption rates which is why we supplement it and i've usually pair it with either black pepper extract or put in like a phosphocholine micelle, which is basically a little carrier package. But if you just have turmeric by itself, you're not going to be absorbing much of the curcumin, which is okay if you're talking about curcumin's anti-inflammatory effects in the gut. There is some evidence to suggest that if you simply have a nice meal of

curry with a bunch of turmeric in it, it could potentially be gut healthy in the small intestine. It's usually for inflammatory disorders. But that's pretty much the only thing I can think of where turmeric as a spice in foods is beneficial. For everything else, you're going to need to use curcumin as a supplement. And specifically, you're going to need to use curcumin as a supplement. And specifically, you're going to need curcumin with a carrier package, so to speak, right? Because there are supplements out there that are just pure, even just pure turmeric. I know turmeric supplements are popular and that's all it is, is just ground up turmeric. Yeah, that's just stupid. If you just have ground up turmeric in a pill, then it's

literally the exact same powder at the grocery store. Right. There's nothing unique about it. And unless they're enhanced some way, that is just going to be useless as a supplement. We use piperidine from black pepper extract in Fortify because that's how we enhance the absorption. Right. And people listening, Fortify is our joint supplement and it contains curcumin, again, with the molecule from the black pepper extract. So you actually can absorb it. And so

it can help your joints as opposed to possibly helping your gut and not really being able to do much else. What about garlic? Let's talk garlic. That's of course a very popular, I mean, it's tasty, but also a lot of people have heard that it's very healthy for you as well. Yeah, like, and now we can sort of see like, because I like garlic, of course, I'm more than willing to just like talk endlessly about the benefits of garlic. And I would recommend two cloves a day, at least. Two cloves a day keeps the everything away. Pretty much like it's a very, it's a jack of all trades supplement. It just does most things in the body.

It's not strong enough to be pharmaceutical on any parameter, but it's a step in the right direction on multiple different parameters, such as boosting inflammation. Reducing inflammation, right? I was going to say boosting immunity. For those who don't know, inflammation and immunity are highly linked, and there aren't many things that both reduce inflammation while boosting immunity. Those two things should not happen at the same time. Very few things dabble in it and in the case of garlic, it can dabble in it because it's not the

strongest anti-inflammatory. It's a little bit of an anti-inflammatory, nothing to write home about, but it does boost immunity at the same time. It may also improve blood flow just due to the sulfur that it contains and also some it's back and forth evidence on how it affects cholesterol triglycerides and then it could also potentially just you know alleviate fatigue especially if you just like bite into the garlic raw wake you up not many people are going to do yeah it will wake you up like i actually uh did that as a pre-workout for a while. I was going to say, it sounds like a pre-workout ritual. Yeah, like I just went to the gym.

Like I had to make sure I wasn't busy because, you know, if you have a bunch of people in the gym, you don't want to just be like biting garlic and go, hey, buddy, can I use a bench? Like, no. It's a way to get a clear bench, obviously. But yeah, I actually had to stop that though because i did get low blood pressure through my workout so it's one of the few things where like you can

test whether or not it's able to reduce blood pressure because if you take too much you get lightheaded which is bad don't do that but it's nice to be able to test like whether or not something works just by being a little bit stupid and garlic can do that so like reduce blood pressure just improve your cholesterol and lipid profile may also reduce arterial calcification so it's like batting averages it's hitting all the balls for improving cardiovascular health just not hitting a home run on any of them that immunity reduce fatigue it just has all these good properties associated with it and the best part is you can just buy the garlic itself like you don't need a supplement like if you want to get a supplement because you don't want to eat garlic all the time you can do so

aged garlic extract is pretty much the exact same thing maybe a little bit better because it's used in most studies and we can refer to that evidence but yeah two cloves a day just overall benefit only real thing is like i wouldn't even call it a spice really like i've never called garlic a spice in my life it's just garlic yeah i don't know i guess by definition right a spice i mean the dictionary says that it's a aromatic or pungent vegetable substance used to flavor food so okay technically garlic would be a spice but but nah, I'm Italian. Garlic is garlic. It is its own category.

You cannot move it from there. I love garlic too. It's also, of course, very easy to eat because it's very easy to work into pretty much any type of meal that you like to eat. Yeah. Just like dice it up, throw it in at the last second and you can leave it out for longer if you don't like the garlicky taste and it doesn't actually impair the effects of the supplement. It actually enhances it to expose it to oxygen.

Interesting. What about something like rosemary? Another one of my personal favorite spices, at least just by taste. I think it's delicious. Oh, yeah, definitely with meat. So rosemary is an interesting one because it doesn't have too many human studies on it. But the bioactive in it is called rosemary acid. human studies on it but the bioactive in it is called rosemaryic acid and rosemaryic acid is a pretty interesting molecule because it's a strong antioxidant it's well absorbed it stays

in the body for a while so the pharmacokinetic profile of it like when you eat it it goes in your body is able to do things and rat studies show that it can be pretty good just for general health and maybe even cognitive effects it's something to be on the lookout for in the next five years whatever you may see rosmarinic acid and a lot more dietary supplements just because of the evidence that's building up what are what are your thoughts are any predictions just based on your understanding honestly like remember in the past how resveratrol was the most popular supplement yeah and then there's some evidence of some research being fabricated then like everybody just stopped caring about resveratrol and now we're hyping curcumin up like beyond its means

curcumin is good but it's not as good as all the claims people are saying right i personally believe that this is this has invited people to fabricate some curcumin studies. I have seen personally some really badly conducted ones. And so I do believe that there will be some point in the future where curcumin is mocked because of some false studies fabricated about it. It will be like sort of shunned, even though it still has benefits. Like resveratrol still has benefits but no one talks about it anymore and then people are going to move on to the next cool looking molecule yeah i mean once once something loses like its magic bullet status then people like yeah but rosemary acid is one of

the like top contenders for me to replace curcumin once it gets like thrown out of the spotlight interesting yeah okay so as you were saying with, with, with Rosemary kind of tangented you. The thing is like the studies we have on it right now, or with isolated Rosemary acid, I'm uncertain if Rosemary as a spice will be able to confer the benefits because the studies that use Rosemary acid in humans do use a kind of low dose like there's one

using between 50 to 200 milligrams but rosemary seems to have a smallish amount of rosemary like if you were to like just take three sprigs of rosemary and eat them straight up you could probably get the benefits but that's not how we spice things with rosemary. We put the rosemary on something, let the aromatics go through the meat, and then we throw the sprigs out. Or if you're weird like me, you just put a bunch in your vegetables and eat it all. Oh, then yeah, you could probably be on the benefits. Yes.

I was like, yeah, because it's going to be the aromatic oils that are leaving rosemary and infusing the meat. The rosemary acid is not an oil, so it's going to be staying in the that are leaving rosemary and infusing the meat right the rosemary acid is not an oil so it's going to be staying in the plant for the most part right but yeah if you just straight up eat the rosemary you can probably get the benefits from the plant itself maybe not even need a supplement but there's still a lot of unknowns about it so we need to just twiddle our thumbs and hope for the best interesting Interesting. How about ginger? Another one that is anti-inflammatory. You hear that a lot with ginger. I think for ginger, if you want to get the benefits of the spice itself rather than a supplement, you can only really get the anti-nausea

benefits. Because once again, these are benefits pertaining to the gut and the intestines where absorption rates do not matter much. and there have been studies on ginger where it helps with nausea just when you put it with food for other effects you would probably either need like a concentrated supplement and what what are what are some of those other effects if you were to take a ginger supplement uh one of the most interesting ones and the highest dose of ginger that like you could ever have is ginger has been proven to increase testosterone oh but you you need about 50 grams of the powder yeah no one's going to be eating that that's and for for people listening if well for example if you take pulse so two

scoops of pulse is let's say about 25 grams of powder give or or take. So it's like a four scoops of pulse dose here. We're talking, that's big. Yeah. And we could potentially find the thing in ginger that has increased testosterone and concentrate it. So that'd be cool. But that's a supplemental thing. That's not a spice thing. Right. You could say that it's an anti-inflammatory. There are some studies showing a little bit of that, but from what I can tell, they're all using dietary supplements or the oils. There are some using about two grams of ginger a day, which it's beyond what is used as a spice, but I could definitely see people eating two grams of ginger. Yeah, that sounds reasonable. I mean, like let's say with sushi,

if you're again, weird like me, you don't use ginger to cleanse your palate. You eat it with every piece of sushi because I like to combine it. Oh, yeah, that would definitely help. So, yeah, I would say putting ginger in your diet could very well carry many of the benefits of ginger, just probably not the ones related to testosterone, hormones, anything related to sperm count. And if you ever heard about ginger being associated with fat burning or appetite, I would not say those are pertinent to the food either. Claims related to nausea, anything for the throat or stomach. And there is some talk about it helping inflammation of the intestines. So any like ulcerative colitis, Crohnhn's disease some people say ginger could help and potentially

through the food and i say potentially because the studies do not seem to be high quality i see and speaking of fat burning which i've never actually heard that as a thing that ginger can help with fat burning but i guess uh if you look deep enough into the underbelly of the interwebs you can find people saying that pretty much anything helps with fat burning. So what about spicy stuff and fat burning? That's a very, of course, very common claim. The spicy, the capsaicin, the spiciness, boosts your metabolism, blah, blah, blah. I just want to make it 100% clear that the perception of spiciness and the sweating that comes from eating spicy foods is completely different from the process of spiciness and the sweating that comes from eating spicy foods is completely different from the process of fat burning. Two completely different processes going on in the

body. If you eat something and you immediately like have the whole sweat going on from spiciness, that is not an indication of fat burning. Some dietary supplements do include capsaicin simply because it can like get people to sweat a little bit but at the same time that it's just sort of a it's a bluff of sorts kind of like the the diamine play if i'm pronouncing that correctly avodiamine avodiamine is also cool it's actually avodiamine and capsaicin work on similar pathways in the body. They work mostly on calcium channels on neurons. But avodiamine makes you feel like you're warmer. But it does this through altering your perceptions of warmth rather than actually freeing up energy to then be burnt as fuel.

So on one hand, you can go, well, it's just thrown in some diet in some fat burners as a bluff. But on the other hand, you can just think that's damn cool. I want some avodiamine berries for the next time winter comes around. Yeah. But the former is why it's, why it's included in fat burners. It just, just so people think that, oh, it must be working. I mean, I feel warmer. So my metabolism must really be going. Yeah. Plus I also have to admit avodiamine is just a really cool name. It is pretty cool. Yeah. And it's an amine. It has the amine in there. It has to be like a neuroactive amine. Which sounds like amino, which is like amino, like BCAAs. And yeah. So yeah. Tyramine, phenylalanine, avodiamine.

So back to the spiciness. So I guess the long story short there is that's a negative. Eating spicy things is not going to increase your metabolism and increase your fat burning. It just is going to make your mouth burn and make you sweat if you are aggressive enough. Correct. There is some like a bit of evidence saying that capsaicin could have independent fat burning effects, but it's only with supplemental doses okay and even then it's pretty weak like capsaicin is mostly the uh it was the first time people even knew what calcium channels on neurons were and that food could interact with it and it has a ton of studies on it because it is the uh it's the research standard if you want to know something about the perception of spiciness, you look into capsaicin,

you get a general feel of what is going on, and then you go, okay, how do we modify the capsaicin molecule to get stronger effects? If you have dihydrocapsaicin, which increases the potency of the spiciness, how does that modify how capsaicin works on these sort of things? It's a research thing. It's kind of like how there's so many studies on vitamin C. It's just the prototypical antioxidant that you learn more about to get a basic understanding before branching out to the stuff that's actually cool. Makes sense. Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread

the word about it? liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at MuscleForLifeFitness, Twitter at MuscleForLife, and Facebook at MuscleForLifeFitness. All right. So what about cocoa? Because I'm a fan of cocoa.

I like dark chocolate. I honestly wouldn't say that there are any major health benefits associated with it. If there are going to be health benefits associated with the epicatechin content, it's going to be when you consume 75 grams of like 90% dark chocolate or something around that range. But missing the forest for the trees here, you just ate 75 grams of dark chocolate for the purpose of like fat burden cardiovascular health, which the chocolate is itself going to work against. If you want to eat chocolate, fine. But if you want the specific health benefits of the double negative sign epicatechin, you probably want to opt for a supplement or just accept the fact that you're going to have some fats and carbs with it. Makes sense. And of course, if you want milk chocolate or white chocolate, you are straight out of luck. It has to be like 80 to 90% dark chocolate.

Yeah. So that makes sense on cocoa. Is there anything else on your list? I mean, those are the things that I wanted to ask you about. Again, I know you do your own little prep for this. Is there anything else on your list of spices and herbs that you wanted to talk about before we move on to oils? Nothing that I could, the little list i have there's just a bunch of herbs they're just useless pretty much i think we covered most of the ones that actually have potential benefit for modify one's diet but for the most part understand that herbs are herbs and if you want the benefits go for a supplement beforehand garlic is pretty much the only one where I outright advocate the food over supplements because cost practicality. And if you don't like garlic, you are a vampire without

a soul. Those are out there. All right, so let's move on then. Let's talk about essential oils. I know a lot about essential oils from a scientific standpoint, but the entire field just confuses me a lot. Like I mentioned this to you earlier, but I honestly think that the reason they've gotten so popular is because people see the word essential and think it's something like, oh, it's a fish oil, but it's an essential vitamin and mineral. And I just want to make it clear, essential is a misnomer when applied to oils. And I just want to make it clear, essential is a misnomer when applied to oils. The proper scientific way to refer to them are volatile oils, because they contain molecules in liquid form that when you ignite them as an aromatic turn into a gas form. So they're quite volatile when exposed to heat, hence volatile oils. That's not going to work for marketing, though.

So that's probably why. Yeah, that's why they went to essential well that's why they went to essential oils but they're also called ethereal oils which oh my god such a good name that sounds pretty cool i'm going to start calling them ethereal oils now it's just so cool the oils of the god of ghosts and all that it's like oh yeah the lavender spirits come take me away that That kind of stuff. Inhabit my flesh. Yeah, consume. But yeah, like it's a bit weird of a topic to go because it's very common that you see essential oils sold alongside homeopathic remedies.

And like, I've always been on board of how homeopathy is just the placebo effect. And that's stupid because- Is that, I don't want to get off on that. I don't really know much about homeopathy is just the placebo effect. And that's stupid because- Is that, and I don't want to get off on that. I don't really know much about homeopathy. Is that true though of all of it, period? I've heard that that's true of definitely the stuff you'd buy in the grocery store or whatever, but that individual practitioners, there can be some legitimacy if you have an individual practitioner who's very educated and is create stuff specifically for you and every condition you're trying to treat, or is that basically fake news? The only way homeopathy can have a drug effect.

And just to reiterate, the only things that can affect you are placebo effects and drug effects. If you take a supplement, you get a reliable drug effect, and then the placebo effect that is additional to that, it's up in the air. Homeopathy, by definition, has no drug effect. The process of making something homeopathic eliminates the drug effect. They basically look at the one rule of pharmacology, the dose makes the poison, the dose makes the medicine, and then they make a 180 and run in the opposite direction. So the process of homeopathy eliminates the drug effect and can only rely on the placebo effect. And then they just try to maximize the placebo effect. And you

can do this with supplements that have a drug effect. Like you can buy homeopathic remedy and get really hyped up about it and believe that it's helping you. Or you can buy a proven pre-workout, get hyped up, believe that it's helping you get the same placebo effect. But you also have the pre-workouts drug effect to rely on it's a one to punch rather than a single jab makes so because yeah, and the only way that you can make a homeopathic remedy have a drug effect is to reverse and deny the essential claim that makes something homeopathic. The process of homeopathy will dilute something to the point where it's just too abysmal a dose. And the only way to get that drug effect back is to concentrate it to get the initial dose back so by definition true homeopathy cannot have a drug effect any homeopathy that does have a drug effect is not homeopathy it's just a supplement

makes sense okay so yeah i was just i was just that's again it's an area i have not researched at all so i was just curious as to your take on it. Yeah, because it's a lot of things when it comes to dietary supplements and alternative health. It's a gray area that you have to take with a little bit of prudence. But homeopathy is one where you just put your foot down. No, that's not how things work around here. Get out. You'd make a good father, Curtis. When are you going to have some children, man?

Oh, man, I don't know. Someone's going to need to bite the bullet with me but yeah like uh moving on to a more gray area it's the aromatherapy that i mentioned earlier because you could argue a drug effect of aromatherapy if you think about your day so far you have smelt things. And those things you've smelt existed somewhere, most of the time. Other times, it's just your brain playing tricks on you. And the reason you can smelt things is because there was something in that thing, like let's say it's a pile of dog shit, where solid molecules just due to fermentation or heat or whatever, just due to fermentation or heat or whatever became a gas and that molecule went through the air into your nasal lining and then affected your neurons in your brain so that's an actual

mechanical drug effect going on and so when it comes to aromatherapy you take actual molecules like a b-myrosine or carophylline which we can prove are in the oils you light them up they turn into gases and they have been detected in like the rat studies you basically hotbox someone with lavender you'd like put a rat in a little cage you just like start pumping it in playing some snoop in the background or something sick bruh yeah you hotbox the rat and you can prove that the molecules actually get into the brain. So there's more than enough evidence to say that aromatherapy could have a drug effect. The only problems are, there are a lot of problems, but there's two that I think of mostly. The first is that aromatherapy studies are very hard to do a proper double blind trial on

because you're not dealing with pills you're dealing with aromas so a lot more prudency and creativity need to be taken when addressing homeo aromatherapy and generally speaking the studies that are more creative and how they get answers are the ones that are questioned more and do not get replicated as fast. Of course, there could be like a super large, super creative study in the near future that just like sends shockwaves out. That happens every now and then with super creative studies. But for the most part, it's lower quality of evidence that we would like. The other problem is associative memories. Because if you were to put someone in a room and say we are administering a scent scent and that scent happens to be Rose, first and foremost, a lot of people will know it's Rose. Secondly, somebody will have different reactions to it, depending if Rose invokes memories of going to grandma's house or Rose invokes memories of a tragic thawning accident that they had when they were a child.

Or maybe their first prom or something. Yeah, exactly. Because scent is very closely linked to associative memory. So it's hard to like just say this scent will do X in a large amount of people, because you have to know about the people and how they grew up and all that. So all of this means that when you look at aromatherapy studies, you have to have a bit more of an open mind. And at the end of the day, you can't say the conclusions as strongly as you would like,

but it is most definitely possible that if you have an essential oil that has a scent that it could potentially affect you. Rose, lavender, and I believe lemon are the ones that are most studied, at least. Do you want to talk about those specifically? Again, you can find all kinds of claims that this oil is going to help balance your hormones, and that oil is going to boost your immunity and fight infection. Oh, yeah. I forgot that the stupidity went that far.

infection oh yeah i forgot that uh the stupidity went that far uh so it's the magic bullet effect again like this one supports digestion i mean i'm reading this off of i won't say who one of these fake doctors you know like one of these they're chiropractors but they say doctor because they want you to think they're an md and it's one of these fake doctor websites like boost energy levels improve brain function all you have to do is like sniff oils all day. It's just... Lavender might be able to reduce generalized anxiety. Rose may also induce a calming effect. While lemon balm may potentially be a little bit stimulating, like stave off sleepiness. That is the level of expectations that you should have

with aromas subtle alterations to how you feel any claim associated with cancer any claim associated with disease states any claim associated with drug-like effects throw them out the window it's bullshit like the effects of aromatherapy are everyone's already felt them you just go it's like these roses smell nice i feel good that's what aromatherapy is that's all it is so when you start getting into the weeds of claims about impacting uh very specific and significant physiological processes like hormones for for example, hormone production? Yeah, not so much. Well, definitely not aromatherapy.

And I'm sure you can get like some sort of oil that interacts with like steroid synthesis. But at that point, you'd have to just orally ingest it. And why would you call it an essential oil at that point? Just call it a supplement. That's what it is at that point. If you're taking something in a pill and putting it in your mouth, it's a supplement. that point, just call it a supplement. That's what it is at that point. If you're taking something in a pill and putting your mouth, it's a supplement. So yeah, like I just think that the term essential oil has, it's gotten really broad looks at almost anything that like a comes from a plant and B is in lipid form and tries to package them all up. I also remember like, I forget where I heard this

from, but it was a marketing thing where if you have one brand of, in this case, it was tomato sauce. If you have like your brand tomato sauce and people could like it, but eventually people will go, Hmm, I want to try another tomato sauce. So they'll go to another brand and you lose profits. But if you then make your regular tomato sauce, homegrown tomato sauce and chunky tomato sauce, they could be the exact same thing. But when people have that natural urge to, I want to try something else, they will stick with your brand. And that's what I think is going on here with essential oils. Rather than just focusing on one molecule that you can prove is beneficial, they grab a category, they break about

that category collectively. And then when one of the oils doesn't work, they say, oh, of course, lemon didn't work. Bullshit reason, bullshit reason, bullshit reason. Have you tried rose? Oh, rose isn't working either. Well, thank you for paying for that rose. It's probably because bullshit reason, bullshit reason, bullshit reason. Have you tried rose paired with lavender under the blue moon? And it's like, as long as you have multiple things to hop back and forth from, you can keep people in your financial influence. Yeah. I mean, that's interesting from a marketing perspective, because then there's the other, on the other side of that coin is line extension, which there are some famous examples of where that

has failed, where you had a very established product. And then, I mean, the New Coke debacle is probably the most, I'd say, cited example of this. But then product. And then, I mean, the new Coke debacle is by the most, I'd say cited example of this, but then there was another one. I forget it was with one of these painkiller brands where they had their standard product they'd been selling for a long time. And they thought that it would be a good idea for that, for that exact reason you just gave to offer an extra strength version of their painkiller. Oh, and it insinuated their main one was weak. That's possible. I mean, that's possible. They don't know exactly. I don't think,

I mean, I've never seen at least anything that would qualify as in-depth, I would say, research with scientific rigor as to what exactly happened and why in terms of maybe maybe a postmortem. But what did happen, period, is they lost market share. And again, the reason that I, when I came across, the thing I first came across is in the book, The 22 Mutual Laws of Marketing, where I guess the conclusion that was shared in the book, which was come to by the company themselves, I guess, in probably following up with research with customers, is basically that psychologically, if you're going to make a change, a lot of people, they don't like change. They don't like change at all in their lives, period. They like to just

do the same things every day, eat the same thing, same brands, watch the same TV shows, and pretty much keep everything the same. And they can take little bits of change, but they don't want that much. So now when they went to go get their favorite painkiller, the painkiller they always use, they had two options. And if they're going to try the extra strength now, because that felt like a change, well, I guess they might as well... Again, I don't remember the brand. Let's say it was Aleve, right? So like, well, if I'm already making a change, maybe I should just try Tylenol or maybe I should just make Advil or just try Advil. And in the end, that's what ended up happening. That extra strength version of the product just ended up bleeding market share. That's interesting. I always just figured you

can make other options in a sort of parallel thing if there's multiple categories. But if you have one product and then you make another one in the same category, say it's stronger, then that just says, oh, hey, take the good one. That thing we've been selling you this entire time, that's the shitty one. The customer is just going to go, oh, well, fuck you too. Just like buy something else in response. Possibly. That may be a bit more cerebral, though. It may be something, again, a bit more just primitive of like, yeah, this feels like a change.

And if I want to make a change, who knows, maybe tie it all is better. But I'm sure that people that are more versed in marketing and branding in particular could probably explain it better and give some examples of it going both ways. Like you mentioned, I could see that with tomato sauces for sure. Like if you see your brand has an extra chunky, that doesn't imply that what you have been using is bad in any way. It's just different. So if you want more chunkiness, then you go with the extra chunky versus something that has a qualitative connotation. Yeah. But I honestly think if you want to address the topic of essential oils the best, it would probably be from a marketing standpoint.

I honestly think that's also why you see the same terms like antioxidant, anti-inflammatory thrown around so much. It's just to make all options seem exactly the same. So you can just, you know, keep on draining people of their money. Like if something works, then they're just going to keep on buying it. Like we could probably stop marketing pulse and people would still buy it just because it works. Yeah, absolutely. It gets so much word of mouth. People try it and they're like, yeah, I like this.

And that's pretty much how it works. Yeah. But if you stopped marketing essential oils and didn't attach any popular claims to it, nobody would buy that stuff. Which should speak a lot based on whether or not it's a good supplement or not. Yeah, I agree with that. I think that's a valid point. Anything else in particular you want to cover on essential oils? Anything specific? I mean, obviously, that's kind of an umbrella statement that probably applies to everything. You mentioned a few that may like if you want a little bit of help relaxing, maybe some rose and lavender can help a little bit.

And if you want a little bit of help not falling asleep, maybe some lemon balm. But beyond that, is there anything specifically you wanted to discuss? Oh, I should quickly clarify that lemon balm as an oral supplement is a sedative, but the scent of lemon is a pro-waking. It helps stimulate you a little bit. Yeah, sure. It's a good distinction to make. Because of course, we have lemon balm in lunar in the sleep supplement that you formulated. So that would be a little bit counterintuitive. It would just get you awake, lucid dreaming all the time. But beyond that, like I would just mention that if you want to dabble in aromatherapy, like first of all, even if it fails, like if you don't actually get any cognitive benefits out of it, at least you can make your room smell pretty.

So it's not a complete loss. Yeah, which is worth something. Like you said, if it's just like, hey, this smells nice. Yeah, I would definitely look into an aromatherapy machine, though. I personally dabble in aromatherapy a bit. And I only have two ways of administration. One is an aromatherapy machine. It's just like a little white box in the corner of my room.

I just put in some oil, press the button, button then the scent's there for a few hours and it's like a little diffuser right yeah exactly you put some water i have one in my office too i don't i don't remember what oil i have something just smells good i'm just like yeah sometimes i use it it smells nice yeah and then uh the other way i do it i sometimes i just put some lavender in my mustache it's right under my nose sure and it works but it's more of a rapid spike that only lasts about 30 minutes but yeah like if you want to dabble in aromatherapy consider an aromatherapy machine because again they're not that expensive or if you do have an expensive one maybe not buy that one you could probably get it for like 30 bucks

yeah you shouldn't spend more than 20 or $30 on a diffuser. Yeah. Cause it would be a, if you truly want to test it out, a diffuser would be the way to go rather than just dropping little bits of oil all around. And I have heard some people say like drop a little bit of oil on your pillow before you go to sleep. Like if it's the lavender or rose and like common aura,

please don't do that because when you're asleep, you're just going to roll your eyeballs in it that's not good and then what happens then your eyeballs your eyeballs get super relaxed man and purple maybe i don't know that's pretty cool yeah but basically just yeah don't just put a bunch of oil on your pillow unless you're going to wash it the next morning including your face like it's just going to build up and be so oh oh it's gonna get it's gonna get it just does not sound good agreed yeah also uh there was one case where i heard someone talking about how they tried the lavender thing on the pillow then they woke up and half their face broke out of acne that's cute turns out oil affects people differently. And sometimes the allergic reactions happen. That's one way to find out. Yeah.

But yeah, that's pretty much all on essential oils. Great. So everybody listening, if you like Curtis, and if you like what he has to say, which you should, you definitely should.

He says so many great things. I'm so classy and clever. No, then definitely head over to our blog over at legionathletics.com slash blog because he is doing a great job putting up all kinds of interesting funny stuff and and he drops some nice little gems like harry coin purse and that that went that's in one of his articles you have to go find it though that's good i like that even if you don't like my humor then at least the information's good exactly at least you try man i like it yeah and if you really dislike my humor then reading my

stuff will make you stronger you'll like learn to tolerate twice as much bullshit as you were before that's valuable yes it's win's win, win, win. So yeah, head over to legionathletics.com slash blog. And you'll see in the feed, the articles have an author attribution. So some of them are by Curtis, some of them are by me, some of them by Army,

who also works with us. And if you click on Curtis's name, for example, you will be able to just see everything he has written. Anything interesting you have in the pipeline the pipeline curtis content wise uh content wise we're just hitting out some like major supplements that have a lot of search yeah one of them that surprised me was licorice i did not know so many people looking at licorice as a supplement but it's actually really interesting because licorice is not just a candy. It's one of like the, I'd say probably top 15 traditional Chinese medicines. It's one of the most promiscuous ones, like because Chinese medicine does have combination

stuff. Like you have Astralis in one hand, and then you have Angelica sinensis in the other. And you could either take them individually, or you can put them together, bam, dengue buxui, tang. And that's used for treating menopausal symptoms. And it's basically that you need to use these two herbs in particular together. And these combination therapies can go up to like four to five different herbs. And licorice is in a lot of them.

In part because it may reduce side effects, may increase absorption, or just may have its own benefits. But licorice is also interesting because it can i would say like after read when the licorice article comes out give it a read keep an open mind you may want to consider licorice supplementation even though it is proven to increase cholesterol and reduce testosterone that's a cliffhanger yeah like you normally should not ever want to be near that kind of thing. And also you should read it because you could potentially just eat too much of the actual candy and reduce your testosterone.

And I tell you the dose of which, you know, don't eat more licorice than this. And beyond that, I'm continuing my theme on looking into interesting, yet not like partially not fully scientific things like placebo effect, the effect of music. Meditation is coming out soon. Oh, good. So an article on that. Just looking at how Eastern and Western medicine interact, the philosophies behind a lot of this stuff. And then if you don't like that stuff i always do overviews on the best

supplements for any sort of situation so it's all kinds of things to get more woke as the cool kids are saying these days oh yeah oh oh you woke bro i'm so old i know i'm not woke i'm just i want to go to sleep now because you said that that's's all right. My old man kicking in. I'm old too. I'm better for it though. My 30s are going to be so much better than my 20s. Yeah, mine too as well. Like I can't be a researcher for that long.

All right, man. Well, thanks as always for taking the time. Really appreciate it. Great information. Again, anybody listening, head over to legionathletics.com slash blog, and you can learn all kinds of neat things, stuff like this, and a lot more. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful.

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